Seven years after his death in Spain, Chester Himes remains as remote from American readers as he was during his lifetime. Celebrated in Europe, particularly in France, where he settled in 1953, Himes has never really been embraced by the U.S. academy, despite the efforts of Hoyt Fuller, John A. Williams, Ishmael Reed, and others. Even with the canon debates and the present ferment in African-American literary studies, Himes continues to be relegated to the periphery. His work gets one line in Houston Baker's Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (though Himes's rendition of black vernacular is one of the best in the business) and but a single mention in Henry Louis Gates's The Signifying Monkey—even though a main character in this collection's centerpiece, "Prison Mass," is called "Signifier."

Why has Himes been so neglected? His work has often been casually lumped with that of Richard Wright as "black protest writing," but Himes simple resists literary and political classification. He always has—as The Collected Stories of Chester Himes makes strikingly clear.

The first such volume since Black on Black—Himes's own 1973 compilation of short stories, essays, and a film scenario—The Collected Stories (61 in all) spans over four decades of his prolific career. It begins with the first piece he published while serving time for armed robbery in the Ohio State Penitentiary during the 1930s, and continues through stories that capture the insurrectionary mood of the late 1960s. Himes seems to have taken his stories wherever he could find them; this collection demonstrates the wide range of his subjects and his extraordinary narrative gifts.

Himes first published in black periodicals like Abbott's Monthly; his "breakthrough" came in 1934, when Esquire printed "Crazy in the Stir" (not included in this collection) and "To What Red Hell," which is based on a 1930 fire at the Ohio state pen that left more than 300 inmates dead and triggered a nine-day riot. In "To What Red Hell," as in Himes's other portraits of prison life, race is often—although not always—subordinate to mood, setting, and character.

Stories like "His Last Day" and "I Don't Want To Die" have the tough, gritty feel of Cagney movies. Others, such as the melodrama of star-crossed lovers in "Her Whole Existence," incorporate some of the worst clichés of popular romance. One has the impression Himes is not only developing his craft, but shrewdly judging the literary marketplace. Esquire did not reveal Himes's racial identity to its readers until 1936. There is certainly a difference between what he published in Esquire and what he wrote for black periodicals like The Crisis, Opportunity, and Negro Story.

After his parole was terminated in the late 1930s, Himes and his wife, like millions of other Americans, were lured to California by the promise of work and high wages. Twenty-three jobs (most of them as an unskilled laborer) and three years later, Himes knew the promise of American democracy was not meant for him. His stories written during this period range from sharply drawn sketches of economic desperation to wild flights of fancy and allegory.

Himes had a wicked gift for satire, a mordant sense of humor, and a highly developed sense of the absurdities of Jim Crow and American racism. In the stories from the late 1930s and early '40s, he gives full vent to his outrage. A terse, two-page tale, "All He Needs Is Feet," sums up Himes's mood: Ward, a black man in Georgia, tries to yield the sidewalk to several whites—including one woman. He is assaulted by the men, the woman screams. A mob quickly forms and decides to teach Ward a lesson. They soak his feet with gasoline and burn them. Ward is subsequently arrested for assault with a deadly weapon and while he is in jail, his feet are amputated. Once released, he learns to walk on crutches and flees to Chicago. One night he goes to see a war movie, Bataan. At the end of the film, the American flag appears on the screen and the national anthem is played. Ward can't get up and is assaulted by a burly white Southerner, who explains to a policeman: "I just couldn't stand seein' that nigger sit there while they played the National Anthem—even if he din have no feet!" This is vintage Himes, the chronicler of a universe where the threat of mindless violence and absurd entrapments lurks just beneath the surface.

In the first volume of his autobiography, The Quality of Hurt, Himes reflected on an anthology of his short fiction planned for publication in the 1950s:

When I read the stories again … they all seemed wrong and there was scarcely one that I felt proud of having written…. I hated the stories. I didn't want my name attached to such a collection. I wrapped them up one morning, and took them down to the bay and threw them into the sea.

The Collected Stories of Chester Himes have been floating around for some time now. I'm glad someone had the good sense to retrieve them.